The haunting self-portraits of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo are renowned
for their dreamlike quality and emotional intensity. A strong and passionate
individual, Kahlo overcame injury and personal hardship to become the
world's best-known woman artist. Celebrated by the Surrealists in her
own lifetime, Kahlo has attained cult status for her extraordinary art
and her tempestuous love life with Diego Rivera, Mexico's most prominent
modern painter.

An outstanding selection of works by Kahlo and Rivera forms the centrepiece
of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman collection, regarded as the most significant
private holding of 20th-century Mexican art. The National Gallery of Australia
is proud to be the sole venue in Australia to show this important exhibition.

Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 near Mexico City. At 18 she was involved
in a bus accident and severely injured, leaving her with chronic health
problems that would prevent her from bearing children. Bedridden for months
after many surgeries, Kahlo began to paint. Not long after her recovery
she met Diego Rivera, whom she married in 1929. While Rivera's controversial
mural paintings have clear political content, Kahlo's works are intensely
subjective.

Her self-portraits are vivid images of an individual and her relationship
to the world, whether as lover and wife of Rivera, as a Mexican citizen,
or as a woman unable to have children. Rooted in the Latin American tradition
of the retablo painting, a simple religious image depicting a miraculous
event in a saint's life, many of her paintings speak of psychological
and physical pain. Her startling combination of realistic and bizarre
symbolic elements led the Surrealist writer André Breton to describe
her work as "a ribbon around a bomb."

This National Gallery of Australia exhibition shows Kahlo's and Rivera's
work within the broader history of Mexican modernism. There are works
by the mural painters José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros,
contemporaries of Rivera. The Gelman collection also contains many examples
of Mexican Surrealism. One of the most important Surrealist artists was
the English-born painter Leonora Carrington, who moved to Mexico in 1942.
Her paintings are dreamlike scenes in which normal events or objects take
on a mysterious, nocturnal menace.

In many ways the stars of the exhibition are the collectors Jacques and
Natasha Gelman. Emigrés to Mexico from Eastern Europe, the Gelmans
were passionate art lovers who dedicated themselves to collecting the
finest examples of 20th-century art. In 1998 their substantial collection
of European modernism was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York. The close relationship between artist and patron is evident
in the many portraits of Jacques and Natasha, which are among the strongest
works in the Mexican modernism collection.